Binary
by Syroc
Summary: As Humanity continues to survive its own desolation, a probe from its past is found by a lone Quarian scout ship looking for new resources for the Migrant Fleet. They followed it back home, and found only ruins. They didn't expect to find survivors.
1. Chapter 1

**Binary**

It has been said that "in space, no one can hear you scream". And though it was said as a tagline to an old sci-fi/horror film, it was very apt. And it would be true, if only on a technical level. In the cold vacuum of space, sound has no place. But such a simplistic vision of what a scream can be cannot persist, if only because if someone were exposed to space in such a way that they _could_ scream they very quickly wouldn't be able to.

But besides that, there are so many _other_ ways to scream.

The inhabitants of a space-station, for example, would certainly scream out desperate pleas for rescue from silent ruins across every wavelength they could transmit even as their oxygen ran out and they slowly suffocated to death.

Ancient, decrepit satellites would endlessly scream a mantra of propaganda to a nation that no longer existed until their orbit decayed and they slowly fell to earth, where they would instead scream for maintenance.

Men and women would scream is horror as they witnessed a blinding light in the distance before being ripped apart by a blast of burning air.

All across the scarred face of Earth, radio towers would briefly scream out terrified accounts of what was happening before they were snuffed out by the thunderous roar of shockwaves and nuclear fire.

When Armageddon rains down from the skies, there is most assuredly a great deal of screaming involved. It continued long after the irradiated dust had settled, in fact.

Further, these screams would reach far further than anything that the mundane variety could ever hope for. They would echo across they smooth, icy surfaces of Europa, bounce through the rings of Saturn, or disappear into the vast void beyond the solar system. They would ripple outwards in all directions until their coherence was destroyed by the light of a thousand suns.

That is, if they weren't snuffed out by the flare of a nuclear explosion. Or maybe a few hundred, applied liberally across a planet's surface.

But still, imagine it: long after your death, your voice might still be heard a thousand years later. Even if it was only as static, a small part of your terror would live on as a scream echoing amongst the stars.

Forever.

Those of a morbidly philosophical nature might then take it upon themselves to build upon that most ancient of sage musings: if a world falls in the middle of nowhere, does anyone ever hear it?

And because the screams of whole civilizations never _really_ die, the answer is _'yes'_.

What was important, then, was how long it would take.

Because war...

...War never changes.

* * *

"Oh _keelah_," the communications officer of the _Idenna_ whispered in mute horror at the readings that appeared on his terminal.

"What is it, Han?" the captain, Lien'Vael, asked with some concern.

"T, this planet isn't dead," Han'Mani stuttered, sounding mortified at the prospect.

This was enough to cause everyone on the bridge to stop what their analysis and look over at the pilot in alarm.

It had been a week since they had entered the system in search of new resources for the main fleet to take advantage of

"What do you mean, "It isn't dead"?" Lien repeated slowly. "The radiation on this rock is worse than that of Tuchanka, and Sae tells me that there has been at least a century's worth of decay! I find it hard to believe that there are _two_ species with such a ridiculous resilience."

"Oh, the radiation is still there, captain," Han'Mani agreed. "But- well, there's too much radio chatter across too many wavelengths going on for the planet to be dormant. Primitive, certainly. But not dead."

Lien'Vael frowned thoughtfully as she reluctantly considered implications of this.

It had been a few weeks since the _Idenna_ had found the small probe drifting out in the middle of nowhere blaring radio signals without regard for who might pick them up. And, after lengthy inspection from the ship's rather modest science division, a set of coordinates had been divined that handily matched up with that of a nearby, if disused, mass relay.

A few jumps later, and they'd happened upon a planet that had long ago been ravaged by nuclear fire. Which wasn't an altogether disappointing development: while they had hoped to find potential trade partners, picking through the ruins of a dead civilization would likely prove to be much more valuable than a fledgling space society: the dead seldom minded when their riches were taken.

"Yes?" she said doubtfully. "And can you decipher any of it? Can you tell if it's not just a recording on repeat, or just a malfunction of some kind?"

"Of course not, captain," Han'Mani shook his head and shrugged. "But it doesn't _sound_ like any recording I've ever heard. It's too... well, animated. Here, listen for yourself."

"_Welcome back to Galaxy News Radio, and this is Thuuurrrrrrrrr-reeeeee Daa-awg! And I'm here to give __you__ the latest and greatest about the wasteland, boys and ghouls! And it's a glorious new day in the capitol wasteland, let me tell you! Clean water, green trees and peace on Earth! What could be better? Oh, I know! Stories about the wild, wild west!"_

The chatter was incomprehensible, but there was no mistaking the sound of speech. There were far too many structured modulations of sound, and a kind of melodic quality that belied itself as such.

But this was not enough to be certain.

"..." Lien said, nonplussed at what she was hearing. "This is gibberish, and proves nothing. There's no guarantee that the signal isn't on loop from a broadcast station that didn't get hit."

"_More and more, we've been hearing rumours of war from traders and refugees: apparently the biggest battle since the Big One has taken place at the Hoover Dam, whatever __that is__. Word from our friends in the Brotherhood of Steel is that we can expect refugees and mercenaries to start leaving the region soon. If they're desperate enough, they might even make their way over here. So people: let's all be sensible, but try to follow 101's example. Be careful, but if you see someone with dire need, don't be afraid to do the right th-"_

_"_Would you turn that nonsense _off_ when I'm talking to you, please?" Lien snapped at Han severely, and behind her faceplate she glowered at Han. "I am your _captain_, not some random passerby!"

"Apologies, captain," Han'Mani said, embarrassed to be called out like that. He pushed a button on the display, and the signal was silenced. "But the transmission at least merits further investigation, does it not?"

The captain of the _Idenna_ stood motionless, but her silence was telling. It was quite possible that they hadn't come across a dead world, but merely a dying one. Or maybe not even that, if Han was right and the transmission wasn't a recording. Whatever had ravaged this world might still be there, living in the ruins of their own creation.

She wondered briefly what kind of creature would be able to manage surviving through a nuclear holocaust. Or even an even more disturbing thought: that they had actively prepared for it. It was one thing to bring about the end of the world, and quite another to plan on it.

But a whole planet, scarred as it was by the legacy of its inhabitants, was a potential resource that could not be ignored.

"We'll have to make planetfall eventually," she said at last. "If only to send out a ground to confirm the surface conditions and just what to expect if the admiralty choose to take advantage of the planet."

She tapped her foot against the ground in irritation as she considered what to do.

"I suppose we could do it sooner rather than later," she turned to address the bridge as a whole. "Prepare a ground team to look for a likely landing sight. Tell them to keep a lookout for settlements, and that they are to report anything they find the moment they find it. This planet might be a ruin, but there might still be something living in it. Let's be quick about this! And someone tell Sae to get the labs and med-bay ready for anything!"

As the captain of the ship continued barking out orders, Han'Mani quietly returned to listening in on the radio transmission.

_"- Mae West you like, or me undressed you like, why nobody will oppose-"_

"I really hope this isn't some kind of weird propaganda," Han mumbled, and began tapping his fingers in time to the beat of the song. "The music is kind of catchy."

"-_truding in nudist parties in studios, anything goes!"_

* * *

John Shepard was eleven years old, and he was dying.

There was no way around it.

Not with a bullet in his side and a limp in his leg that he wouldn't be able to walk off.

Not with the feral but cowardly dogs baying at the moon behind him as they followed the scent of his blood, or the quiet scittering of chitinous segments that he hoped were ants and not the terrifying scorpions, or the hundreds of other sounds that would make his death an imminent reality if he did not keep ahead of or away from.

Not with the chill of night sinking into his body, though thankfully that brought with it a soothing numbness against the agony he was in. Better to be cold than to feel the full extent of his pain.

Not with everyone in he had ever known long gone, dead or wearing a collar.

But at least he wouldn't starve. That much, at least, was something to treasure.

He'd seen a starving man, once. It was inevitable, really: living the nomadic life of the caravan, he spent a lot of time on the broken roads of America. Corpses, both new and old, were not uncommon sights. And every so often they come across whose luck had just about run out. Most of the times they simply hadn't prepared well enough. After all, it was one thing to survive in the ruins of a city or even in the nearby wilderness, and quite another to walk hundreds of miles across hostile terrain.

They'd found him sitting in the middle of the road, propped up by his bulging pack of supplies. Hollow eyes stared at them without an ounce of recognition as they approached. In his hands he clutched a plastic bottle of the clearest water John had ever seen, and many other such bottles scattered all around the man, both full and empty.

And more in his pack.

He'd likely stocked up on clean water for the trip, but thought he could forage enough food on his own. A foolishly dangerous notion: every time he strayed from the road into the wilderness he'd risk getting lost or attacked.

The man tried to drink from it, but his hands and arms were too weak and withered to lift it all the way to his lips. It had fallen from his grasp and rolled away, spilling its contents on the ground.

John's father had whispered a quiet prayer to a nameless god before he'd slit the man's throat.

And then he'd taken the water from the man's pack.

"There was no saving him," his father had rationalized afterwards. "Even if we could spare enough supplies to feed him. He'd been out in the sun too long. It was a mercy we were there to stop his suffering."

That was the part that stuck with him the longest.

He'd had nightmares about it for weeks afterwards, imagining himself as an emaciated husk of his former self, his ruined body too weak to do anything but pant for breath and hope that someone more charitable but less merciful than his father would find him.

It was his greatest fear

No, he wasn't going to starve. From this knowledge, he drew strength.

He'd die and be eaten _long_ before that ever became a danger. And hopefully it would happen in that order.

But until then, he moved towards the rising sun.

East, towards the ocean.

He didn't quite certain why he was going there of all places, but it was best to always have a destination in mind in times of desperation. Something to look forward, a point in the future that was distinct from the present in that he wouldn't be dying. And his mother had shown him a map once, a picture of the whole world. That had been an eye-opening experience: to see that everywhere he knew, every place he had ever been or seen on the horizon, was such of small part of that map when compared to its entirety. A world that consisted mainly of places he could never even dream of seeing. And when he had asked what the huge blue parts were, he'd been told that it was all water. Miles upon miles of water. Water without end.

At the time, his mother had laughed and made an offhand comment about that being something worth seeing before she died.

John, eleven years old with a bullet in his side and limp in his leg, had decided she was right and that now was probably better than later.

He blinked hard in an effort to stop them burning from the fatigue that was growing with each passing moment. He had been moving through the wasteland for days without any rest, so great had his terror of the raiders been. But his fear of them had long ago left him. Now the only thing that was driving him forward was his frail hope that somehow the cruel mechanics of fate and chance would now work in his favour.

So.

Focus.

One foot in front of the other, again. And again, ignoring the jolt of pain that surged through his leg as he put his weight on it. Again.

The dogs cried out again, closer this time. Much closer. They couldn't be very far away, now.

Faster.

He forced himself to lurch forward with renewed vigour that came from terror-infused focus.

It was a bad mix, which became readily apparent as soon as his burning eyes missed a particularly resilient root that tripped him up and caused him to tumble forward into an undignified heap. The sudden spill sent fresh waves of pain through him so severe that he cried out.

Much to his dismay, something heard him.

With a low growl a dog charged out of the gloom, and in the light of the moon John saw only a dark shape as it clamped down on one of his feet, and it was only through sheer dumb luck that the boy had been wearing his too-big boots when he had fled that saved him from having his ankle torn apart. Instead, it worried at the thick leather uselessly, growling ferociously as it grew more excited at the prospect of an easy meal.

He lashed out with his other foot, kicking it had in the side of its muzzle. It squealed sharply with surprise and pain, letting go of him in order to do so.

The moment he was free he scrambled to get his feet back under him, the vulnerability of his situation lending him a desperate haste. Starving was bad, but being eaten alive by wild dogs was a maybe a close second.

He rolled onto his belly, and just as he got to his knees the snarling dog leaped at him yet again. It bit into his thigh, and this time Shepard wasn't so lucky: the dog's teeth, dull though they might have been, easily tore through the worn cloth of Shepard's ancient pants and deep into his thigh.

The boy cried out in pain yet again, but wasted no time in throwing himself heavily backwards towards the dog, twisting around to aim an elbow at its neck. The movement tore deep gouges into his thigh as he wrenched it out the dog's maw, and though his intended blow didn't seem to do much he _did_ hear a very satisfying snap as he fell on top of the beast. It yelped with pain yet again, and realized that Shepard was putting up too much of a fight for its tastes. It rolled out from underneath Shepard and loped out into the night, noticeably off-cadence.

But before he could savour this minor victory there came another growl from behind him, and then he felt teeth biting deep into his shoulder. It twisted and tugged and tore, pulling his arm from its socket as it did. The exquisite pain surging through him pierced through the haze of his adrenaline rush, and it maddened him. He'd been living with pain for _days_ now, and that had been enough to dull it a bit. But all of the sudden movements caused the bullet in his side to move. The relatively old wound was torn open once again.

Without full awareness of what he was doing he tried to slap the beast away with his free hand. But somehow in the brief not-even seconds it took for him to do so his fingers rebelled, and instead of striking the dog's head they found their way into its eye.

It was a lot more tougher going than he'd ever expected it to be, and though his own revulsion at the concept of maiming a creature's sight initially stopped him from putting all his weight into it he quickly abandoned all empathy for the dog when it merely scrunched its eyes closed and began tearing at him ever more fiercely. He forced his fingers through its eyelids, and tried not to think about what it might feel like for someone to reach into his eye-socket with the intent of tearing something out.

The dog clenched down harder as its eye was destroyed, and Shepard's mind went blank. It was as if the pain had pressed all rational thought out of him, leaving only a desperate need to survive.

He was aware that his body was moving, certainly. He was aware of the struggle against the dog's attack even as another's teeth found some new vulnerable spot. He was aware of screaming, of warm wetness in his hands, of cracking bone and tearing flesh and then terrible silence.

But he was mostly aware of pain.

It remained with him as he slowly regained his senses and found himself hunched over the prone body of a dog, pounding at its ruined skull with a hand that had been cut by shattered bone as blood rushed in his ears. His breath was coming out heavy and ragged, seemingly hampered by the hammering of his own heart.

But he could still hear growling. He could still see slowly moving shapes, dim reflections of the moonlight.

But in that moment, he was still alive. A strange euphoria passed over him, and despite knowing that his survival was only temporary he found himself laughing. A wild, savage laughter that shattered the silence of the darkened wasteland.

Without warning, the wild dogs fled back into the night. Shepard heard their retreating stride over his own laughter, which only caused him to laugh harder despite the pain it caused him.

As he basked in the glow of survival, with blood seeming to ooze from every part of him, Shepard thought that the dogs had fled from _him_. That somehow, in his perfect berserker madness, he had become more of a beast than they were willing to contend with. But as the roar of blood in his ears faded, he became aware of a different kind of roar: that of engines and rushing air.

Light flooded down from above, and instinctively Shepard turned to look at the source. He immediately regretted it, as the searchlights from a Quarian surface vehicle nearly blinded him. With a yelp of surprise he averted his gaze and covered his eyes with his one good arm.

Already unbalanced, he quickly fell onto his rump.

He heard the roar grow closer and louder by the second, and he half-expected the sound to be abruptly cut off as the strange ship landed on him. It would certainly suit his luck so far.

But no, it touched ground some distance away, kicking up wind and dust as its thrusters flared suddenly in order to ensure a soft landing.

It was only when the roaring finally stopped that he felt it safe to try and look again. This time, however, he gave his eyes time to adjust.

The ship didn't look like anything he'd ever seen before. He'd seen vertibird's once, many years ago: his parents had been conducting a trading mission to a New California Republic outpost, and it had taken him by surprise to see something so huge zipping through the air. But even so, they had had a certain... grace to them, as if flying were the most natural thing in the world for them to do.

The thing in front of him looked like nothing so much as a brick. A flying brick with bits sticking out on the bottom and the back. A flying brick with extra bits and what looked like a series of patchwork repairs along all of it. If Frankenstein's monster could have been an aircraft, that was what it would look like.

A panel slid back, and in the dark of night it seemed as if blinding light issued forth from it

They _looked_ human. Human-ish. Mostly. They seemed too slender, too thin. And though he couldn't tell very well with the bad lighting, he thought that he could see a few unnatural curves in them. Limbs in the wrong shape.

They seemed to spot him, and after a quick discussion between themselves that he couldn't hear they trotted up to him. More half-seen details became apparent to him as he watched them with mounting alarm. He could see no features where their faces should be: only the dull, smooth surface of plastic. Strange feet that were completely alien from any human's. Alien hands.

Fear tore into him, and even though he was freezing and weak and half-dead, Shepard forced himself to rise to his feet and try to run. He made it only a few lurching steps before what little strength he had left failed him

"No!" he cried out through the pain, and with one hand he tried desperately to drag himself away from the alien creatures.

As gentle but firm hands steadied him and soothing but incomprehensible words were spoken, John Shepard couldn't stand it any longer.

He laughed again, a wild and desperate bray that would eventually change to sobs as he realized that they weren't hurting him.

As they gently picked him up and carried him to their strange, alien ship, the fatigue of his long journey finally caught up to him. He welcomed darkness.

* * *

**AN:** Hello there, thralls. Hope you enjoyed the beginning of this story, as there will be maybe 2-3 more chapters. And then it's done. Unless someone else wants to run with it. Which they are welcome to do. When I'm done.

If you're a fan of Rogue Nation and you're wondering wtf I'm doing starting _another_ ME story while I'm months late on that, consider this to be me getting back into a sci-fi groove. The next chapter _is_ coming.

That said, do tell me what you thought! Give me your reviews, your favourites and your follows!


	2. Chapter 2

**Binary**

Shepard was aware of voices, but they didn't sound like anything he'd ever heard before. The words and voices were all wrong, everything about them alien to his ears. They _sounded_ female, though. Mostly. Sort of. He thought they were female, anyways.

_"By the ancestors, how is it still alive? Bullet wounds, broken bones, signs of malnutrition and dehydration, more lacerations than I can count and it looks like his arm has been halfway torn off. Did the ground team rescue it from a meat-grinder, by any chance?"_

It was all nonsense to him. But strangely soothing nonsense: even if he couldn't understand a word of it, he found himself wanting to hear more.

_"Very droll, Sae. He is still alive, though?"_ a second voice said, and Shepard could almost convince himself that there was a note of question in its speech.

He could feel light through his eyelids, and even though he was far too tired to do anything about it he wished that someone would turn them off. It was hard to sleep with them in his face.

_"For now, yes_," the first voice said, and sounded disappointed. _"Though of course I cannot make any promises about the future. Without any physiological or medical data I am severely limited with what I can do. It's lucky that it passed out: I couldn't even properly sedate it without risking an allergic reaction. And I would like to remind you that even should it survive its wounds, it will starve unless we can scavenge something for it to eat."_

Strangely, what he was _most_ aware of was just how _warm_ he was. It was the warmest he'd felt in _days_, which wasn't saying much.

He felt soft fabric on his skin, which was an entirely new experience for him. Everything he'd ever owned in life had either been salvaged from one of the many ruins scattered along the cracked roads of America, or second-hand items his parents would trade for.

Save for the gnawing hunger in his belly, he was the most comfortable he'd ever been in years. Had he been more cognizant, he might have wondered if it made him a horrible person that he could be so at ease only a few days after his whole life had come crashing down around him.

"_We'll have that soon enough. The ground team has covered a lot of ground, and they've marked three settlements within a few hours walking distance from their initial landing zone."_

_"Hmph. Primitives, surviving in the ruins of their ancestors."_

_"Aren't we doing the same, Sae? They just can't take theirs with them."_

_"It's not the same!"_ the first voice protested loudly. The vehemence and sharpness of its voice was enough to jolt him into a higher level of wakefulness, and then he became uncomfortably aware that his last memories were of strange, alien creatures pursuing him after nearing being killed by wild dogs. It was enough to startle him fully awake, though he resisted the urge to bolt upright with a scream.

Instead, he kept perfectly still as he slowly opened his eyes, hoping fervently that the two speakers were too engrossed in their own discussion - whatever it was – to notice the tiny movement.

They were very much like he remembered them, but at the same time very different. What he had thought were featureless faces were, now that he could see them better, tinted glass faceplates that showed very little of what was behind them. The child could only make out the faintest of details behind then: a shadow that might be a nose, a pair of outlines that could be eyes, hints of movement that had to be lips.

Below that, they seemed to be wearing form fitting suits of some kind. (Had the boy been a few years older, in fact, he would have found this to be more than a little distracting.) Their suits were decorated by lengths of cloth which were themselves decorated with patterns. The first one, the one that had woken him, wore dark maroon cloth with thin, swirling white stripes that reminded Shepard of the way water moved. The second's was leaf-green stippled with pale lines of spots that flowed in no particular order.

Some part of Shepard objectively knew that he should be afraid. After all, he'd been abducted by a strange creatures, whisked away to some unknown location and now two of them were apparently fighting over something while the others were out doing… whatever it was strange creatures that travelled around in ugly flying bricks did when they weren't abducting children.

But the part of Shepard that was subjectively thankful to be alive and if not in good health then at least not slowly bleeding to death of his wounds found itself wanting to simply watch and listen to them. They were so different. So... _alien_.

An ocean was all well and good, but he hadn't even _heard_ of these creatures before. Right now, _they_ were worth seeing before he died. (And the objective part of his mind was quick to remind him that it was still very much a possibility.)

_"Of course not. But even you can admit that there are similarities."_

_"No. We are different, captain. This planet was destroyed by nuclear war! We did what we had to for our survival!"_

_"I imagine that their ancestors firmly believed that what they did was for their own survival as well, Sae. Or they probably wouldn't have done it."_

_"Enough of this!"_ There was no mistaking the anger and agitation _there_. "_If you wish for the little monkey to survive, tell the ground teams to sift through whatever ruins they come across for something we can use!"_

"_And I'll be sure to tell them that as soon as you tell what they can look for."_

_"How do you think I should know? The creature's been unconscious for hours, and even if it woke up right I couldn't even begin to know how to speak to it!"_

_"Well," _the calmer one nodded at right at him and a wave of fear ran up the boy's spine as he realized that he'd been caught._ "It's funny you should say that. He's been watching us for the last five minutes."_

_"What?!"_ the first one's head snapped towards him. Shepard recoiled instinctively. "_Why didn't you say anything sooner? He could have-"_

_"-heard us speaking a language he's never heard in his life before?"_ amusement was in her voice. "_Oh no, how terrible. And we just got done talking about how to bypass the Fleet's security measures. Whatever shall we do?"_

_"Don't be glib, captain! This is a serious matter-"_

_"Oh, give it a rest Sae. You're scaring it,"_ the second one approached him slowly, kneeling down next to the medical table on which he'd been resting. "_Hello. How are you feeling?"_

Shepard could recognize the expectant silence for what it was: an invitation for him to break it. Simple enough.

"What?" he said dumbly, not sure what else he _should_ say.

The blue one looked over its shoulder at the other red one.

"_I begin see what you mean, Sae."_

"_Indeed. Let's start out with the basics, then," _the red one gestured to herself. "_Sae'Sorel. Saaaah-eey So-rehl."_

Then she pointed at him expectantly.

Shepard, confused as to what was going on, decided to do the first thing that came to him.

"Saah-eh So-rehl," he repeated slowly, getting a feel for the sounds of their language.

_"Hah!_" the second one laughed. "_Not quite what we were after."_

_"Indeed," _the first one said. "_Why don't you try, captain?"_

_"Well, if you think it'll help-"_

_"I don't. But all the same, I'd like to see it try."_

The second one looked over at the first for a moment, but then shrugged and pointed to herself.

"_Lien'Vael,"_ she said, in much the same way the first had. "_Lee-en Vay-el."_

And then she pointed at him.

Shepard, more confident in his abilities this time, quickly took his cue.

"Lien'Vael," he repeated almost flawlessly, and grinned. "Lee-en Vay-el."

"_Better!"_ the blue one cheered, and nodded her head rapidly to show her approval.

Shepard found himself grinning despite himself at the praise, even if he didn't know what he was saying.

"_Well, it seems to have gotten the hang of the sounds," _the red one said. "_A shame it can't understand a word of what we're saying."_

Shepard watched as the green one turned away from him to address her companion

"_We need to start somewhere if we're going to understand one another, and this is a good a way as any."_

"_It will starve before it learns to speak to us, Captain. We need to find another way."_

_"You're right,"_ the green one said slowly. And then it turned back to him, studying him carefully. "_Ancestors. If I hear anything about this, Sae, I will see to it that you'll be studying stool samples for the rest of the week."_

The novelty of a completely new language was losing the last of its charm as Shepard was forced to listen to the two of them talk as if he weren't there yet again.

_ "I beg your pardon, captain?"_

_"I'm just telling you right now..." _she shook her head suddenly, and sighed in defeat. _"I haven't played this game since I was a child."_

Shepard watched in confused fascination as the woman then took great pains to mime the act of eating something. This was actually more difficult than it sounded, mostly due to the simple fact that her face was obscured by her helmet. Even so, Shepard quickly caught on once he realized that she kept bringing her a hand to where her mouth could have been behind the mask, made a noise of satisfaction and rubbed her belly. Some things, it seemed, were universal. Enjoyment of a meal was one of them.

"Food!" he cried out. "Eat!"

He copied her miming as well, though he put a particular emphasis on the act of biting into an imaginary piece of food to make sure they really were thinking along the same lines. It never hurt to be too sure.

The green-clad creature nodded, and then went on with a new set of movements.

The game of charades continued back and forth for what seemed like hours as each of participant tried to puzzle out the meaning or implication of the other's body language, and in doing so the two learned some puzzling insights into each other. Shepard, for example, learned that apparently the strange creatures stood on their tip-toes and lifted their head as far it would go when they were looking for things, and they both learned that they were well acquainted with the act of rummaging through the contents of cabinets or cupboards. This had produced the word "search" and "forage" for Shepard, which was then confirmed when he tried to mime his own version of them back at them and they learned that he would shade his eyes if he was peering into the distance. "Want" was trickier to convey, and involved the two creatures performing an elaborate scene where one of them held something and the other reached for it with obvious yearning. (It was worth noting that this was only done after the red one had finished quietly snickering while the green one berated it for doing so. That too, it seemed, was universal.)

Somewhere along the lines he realized that the words he had repeated at them earlier weren't words at all, but names. He'd only caught on to that when he realized that they only said them at each other, and had his suspicion confirmed when uttering them again caught the attention of one of them immediately and the other more slowly. Then, realizing that they had introduced themselves and he had not, he quickly did so himself.

The three of them spent a very informative hour together, piecing together the meaning of three words.

And then the two aliens learned that after taking the time to convey the meaningof all three of those words and then pointing at him meaningfully would cause him to get very, very nervous.

The reason for it was very simple, and some insight into Shepard's mental process handily provided that reason.

They needed food. And they wanted him to find it for them. And... why did they keep pointing at him?

Oh.

Oh _no_.

Were they going to _eat_ him if he couldn't find them food? Why would they- but that didn't make any sense!

Except... it did, actually. Why else would they rescue someone from wild dogs, if not to profit in some way from it? In other times, he might have thought that such things could be done out of simple kindness, but with the memories of the attack on his caravan still fresh in his mind it was difficult to entertain such a notion with any conviction.

And with that in mind, he tried to

"No!" he said loudly, shaking his head from side to side violently. "I know where to find food! I can get lots!"

Which was true: while travelling with the caravans he'd foraged for all kinds of foods for the evening meal. It was one of the few things a child his age was useful for, out on the road.

_"I think it understands,"_ Sae'Sorel murmured._ "Though it seems to be nervous. Frightened even."_

_"Maybe he knows you don't like him."_

_"It's certainly about understood the part about food, though," _the science-officer mused, ignoring her captain's gibe._ "It keeps pointing at its mouth and stomach."_

_"So it's hungry? Well, I suppose."_

_"No... it's not that. Look, it's trying to mime something back..."_

_"Ancestors. We make first contact with a new species, and the most success we've had is with playing charades,"_ Lien'vael grumbled._ "Can you make anything out of- wait, is he- That's it! He's foraging! I think he's trying to tell us he can look for his own food!"_

_"Preposterous! It was half-dead only a few hours ago, and it's only had a few hours of rest!_"

"_Well, maybe it's very hungry?"_

_"Captain, I don't think-"_

Shepard noted the argumentative tone of the red one's voice, and drew the only conclusion that his eleven year old, half-dead being could come up with: she wanted to eat him.

The part of him that had woken up as the dogs had attacked him, the part that was rage and pain and blood, stirred as the fear began to well up in him. He forced himself to straighten his posture and put steel into his voice. It was a strange thing, how easily it came to him: he'd never really been all that authoritative before, but now it seemed almost as natural as breathing.

"No," he said resolutely. "I _will_ find food for you. I can do it."

"_... Okay, I'm pretty sure I understood some of that. He really wants to look for food, Sae."_

Sae'Sorel threw up her hands and shook her head in defeat.

"_Fine. But when it dies from exposure, don't expect me to restrain myself from saying I was right."_

_"Then we'll just have to make sure it doesn't go alone, won't we?"_

* * *

Tala'Xen did not like this new planet. It was a horrible place, even for a people like the Quarians who lived their entire lives carefully sealed up in environmental suits to protect them from the outside world.

The planet seemed determined to remind them all that the worst dangers the galaxy had to offer were seldom of the size of a microbe. The wildlife seemed to be wholly hostile, attacking anything it could sense. They'd been ambushed by mammals of all shapes and sizes, and by the end of their first brief expedition into a dead city they'd already lost one of their members to a swarm of enormous arachnids with giant pincers and barbed tails. Not nearly as bad as something from the Krogan homeworld, maybe, but they had been deadly all the same. The screams of his fallen comrade was still ringing in his ears as the marine had been impaled again and again by their terrifying stingers.

It had all started so _well_, too. They'd found that poor monkey-alien half-dead on the dusty road, and managed to keep it alive long enough for Dr. Sorel to be transported to the surface in order to establish an emergency base-camp just to treat it. (Which was something of a miracle, really: the surly scientist never liked to leave the quiet solitude of her tiny lab and medical station.) With such a promising start to the expedition, they'd hoped to be able to follow up on it relatively quickly. Even with the somewhat disconcerting state they'd found their first alien in, it had seemed reasonable to assume that there would be another group of them in a less critical situation.

But all they found were ruins, monsters and hundreds upon hundreds of skeletons. Everywhere they went, they were reminded of the grisly fate that had befallen this world.

And every time he saw them, a thought would turn up in his mind like a dark shadow.

_What kind of person could live in a world like this?_

Even the Tuchanka wasn't this bad: certainly the world was covered in ruins, but not the _dead_. _Those_ had been long ago eaten or cleared away by either the wildlife or the elements. This world, however, was simply the largest tomb in the galaxy

And with that thought there came a gnawing fear that Rannoch would be like planet as well: nothing but ruins, bones and Geth waiting to kill anything they could find. How long would _he_ be able to live in the ruins of his ancestors?

All he wanted to do was leave this planet behind.

"Lieutenant Tala'Xen," the sound of his captain's voice caused the marine to turn and snap to attention as if a whip had cracked. As he did so, he noticed that she was flanked on one side by a petulant Dr. Sorel (no doubt annoyed that she had been dragged out of her labs and away from the samples he had secured.) and by the little monkey-alien on the other, still very wounded but nevertheless standing unassisted. There was a determined gleam in its eyes, as if it was daring him to challenge it. Which was ridiculous: it looked like a strong gust of wind would bowl the child over.

"I have a mission for you."

Somehow Tala'Xen just _knew_ he wasn't going to like it.

* * *

**AN**: Right, just to get this out there: there isn't going to be any focus put on any of the Fallout game stories except in a tangential manner. This is just a very short story that establishes how such a meeting of the worlds might _start_. You want that, go read _From The Ashes_.

More importantly, however, is that there will be absolutely no "Franchise A has better tech/weapons/whatever than Franchise B!"-style comparisons. Because that's just too silly for me.

Now with that said, GIVE ME YOUR REVIEWS, YOUR FAVS AND YOUR FOLLOWS!


	3. Chapter 3

**AN:** HAH! Bet you didn't expect to see an AN up here, did you?! That's how we do things around here: unexpectedly. Anyways, just an FYI before we get into things.

"_Italics in speech"_ = words not known/understood by Human/Quarians, depending on who says it. If Shep says something italicized, the Quarians don't know it and vice versa. Words spoken with emphasis will be marked with an underline.

_Italics in narration_ = just italicized for emphasis.

I've tried to make this distinction easy to spot in the narration, but I figured I'd play it safe.

* * *

**Binary**

Shepard was quickly exhausting his options as the ensuing days dragged on. He wasn't entirely too familiar with this region, and so his limited abilities as a hunter and gatherer were further limited by his ignorance. His parents had done their best to inform and teach him along the road, but they'd done most of their business further West. This region of the country was a crisscrossing mess of rivers, wasted plains and forests and desolate mountains. However, there were things that were almost universal.

Over the course of three weeks Shepard was escorted through the wilderness by a trio of the aliens. (And he called them such with confidence, for that was what Shepard was growing increasingly certain that they were. He'd seen their flying brick sly straight up into the night sky until it was nothing more than a distant twinkle before vanishing. At that point he'd had to concede that there wasn't a whole lot else they _could_ be.) Of the three, there was always the stoic Tala'Xen, who was obviously a leader for of some kind for the others. And considering that he was always openly armed, that would probably make him a leader of soldiers. Shepard had mentally filed him under "people to impress", and had always made sure to offer him the first pick of whatever he caught or harvested.

And, even though he wasn't exactly in his best element, he did manage to make a good showing of it.

Rats, or rather rodents, were always an easy meal. They were quite tasty, but it had to be cooked very thoroughly to alleviate the risk of some disease transmitting. Nobody wanted to have worms eating their way out of the small intestines, after all. The difficulty was in _finding_ the twitchy little devils: they tended to be cowardly animals when not in a swarm. Squirrels in particular were difficult to get his hands on, and towards the end of his travails Shepard had a new appreciation the insult 'squirrelly bastard'. However, those too he managed to get a hold of by rigging up the classic box-trap. (Which involved bait, a box, a stick to hold up one half of the box and a long piece of string.) He'd spent a few very tense hours waiting for something to take the bait, but he's eventually been rewarded for his efforts.

Unfortunately, his catch had been dismissed out of hand by his captors. Shepard didn't blame them, but that didn't stop him from eating his quarry all the same. He'd taken particular pleasure in skewering the squirrel.

Lizards were better fare, though their position at the bottom reaches of the food chain understandably made them very leery of anything bigger than them. Shepard, in his weakened state, wasn't nearly quick enough to catch them by hand. For the longest time the only thing he'd been able to catch were tails, which wasn't about to impress anybody. However, since it had already proven effective on _one_ animal, he'd tried out the box again.

But these too were likewise refused, which seemed like such a waste to Shepard. Lizards were delicious. Shepard ate those as well, as it would be a shame to waste all that meat.

Birds were next on the list of animals he could offer up in his place, which was a shame because he no idea how he was supposed to go about catching something that could take flight and didn't hesitate to do so at the first sign of danger. After spending hours upon hours with his now much beloved box and string waiting, he'd been forced to admit that maybe it wasn't the be-all and end-all of hunting.

And there were also the various roots and small vegetables to be found, though these were understandably much rarer. The earth and water had been poisoned, after all, and that which could survive in such harsh conditions were rarely something that could be safely eaten without further poisoning oneself with radiation. But some there was always something to be found for a young man looking for a meal so as not to become one.

By that time he was feeling well enough that he could travel further and faster. He braved the dangers associated with large bodies of water in order to pull up cattails, he dug up deceptively desiccated stalks to reach the healthy roots below, he scoured the countryside looking for whatever herbs could be found, he even managed to find a patch of wild rice that he hastily harvested before realizing that he had no idea how to separate the seeds. But he'd kept them all the same, on the basis that more was better than less.

All the same, he'd presented his varied bounty to the aliens with a hopeful grin. He'd been crushed when, once again, they wanted nothing to do with his bounty. But not too crushed to not make a savoury stew out of it.

Of course, food wasn't the only thing he picked up on his many excursions into the wasteland. As he was always escorted by his captors, he learned quite a few things from them as a matter of necessity. Simple words and phrases, mostly. Greetings. Names. Hardly enough for him to hold a conversation, but enough that he wasn't totally ignorant of what they were saying to him. Or about him, for that matter. And he, for his part, became fluent enough to tell them about the hazards of wasteland.

And there was a great many of dangers to tell them about.

He taught them that night was the worst time to be exposed, because that was when the radscorpions came out to hunt. It was likewise best to approach shaded areas with caution, because that was where they liked to rest until nightfall.

He taught them to stay away from large tunnels, as it was impossible to say for certain what lived there. What might be a shelter for rats could also be a den of wasteland wolves, which were like wild dogs but bigger, meaner and smarter. Wolves wouldn't have attacked him alone: no, they would have come all at once and ripped him apart in minutes.

He taught them how to make smokeless fires, and why they should never again even _think_ about using the ancient tires that could be found on just about every old-world vehicle quietly rusting its way to oblivion. The smoke was visible from miles away, and the smell had a tendency to attract super-mutants. _That_ had been very, very difficult to convey, as the name wasn't exactly something that came up in regular conversation. The best he'd eventually managed was telling them that they were a kind of man-eating giant. Which wasn't too far from the truth.

He taught them how to look for ant-holes, and how to find and avoid their scent-markers so that they wouldn't be followed when the ants invariably went out to search for food.

He taught them... well, he pretty much gave them a laundry list of things that could and would kill and eat them, and whatever advice he had to prevent that from happening. They might be threatening to eat him, but until they did their bumbling ignorance of the danger that surrounded them was just as much a danger to him as it was to them.

The aliens for their part were grateful for his advice, and took his word to heart. It was almost comical, the amount of credence they gave his lessons: he was almost tempted to feed them a line of lies just to see them do something ridiculous. But he fought back such impulses. Doing so would jeopardize their trust in him, and even if he weren't reliant on their good will that wasn't something he was prepared to risk. Some survival techniques needed to be taken seriously no matter how ridiculous the notion seemed. (Harvesting the poison glands of radscorpions in order to prepare a savoury stew, for example, _always_ seemed like madness to those who didn't know how to prepare the meal.)

Still, it never failed to bring a small grin to his face to see a semi-circle of grown adults watch attentively as he showed them some new aspect of wasteland wisdom. (Life among the caravans, travelling through had imparted him with many of them.)

He couldn't have known that the Quarians ascribed much more importance to his words than he could have ever suspected. To him, he was simply telling them how to avoid getting killed. To them, he was teaching them how to adapt to the planet. He was teaching them how to turn it from a hostile wasteland into something that might, if one were generous with the term, be called a home.

All the same, he found himself liking his captors. Even with the unspoken threat at all times, he couldn't help but look forward to each excursion.

And it was because of this that, even after he had recovered to such a state that he felt confident in travelling once more, he didn't leave them in the night.

But that would soon be coming to a close, one way or another. He'd exhausted the resources of the wasteland, and now the only thing that might satisfy them were the Old World foods. He couldn't imagine why they would want it: there couldn't be much left of it at this point, and it wasn't even like it was the best food available. It couldn't be after two hundred years of laying neglected inside irradiated buildings.

He wasn't exactly eager to delve into the ruins of the old world, but that was what was left to him.

He just hoped that he wouldn't have to give the Qurians another lecture on the last and possibly most dangerous threat in the wasteland: other humans.

Because he really was warming up to them. He didn't want to give them yet another reason to kill and eat him.

* * *

Fallston had been a very small suburban community two hundred years ago, and had been built as a refuge of sorts from the hustle and bustle of the city that most of its residents commuted to every day for work. It had been built alongside the edge of a long plateau, the houses facing a long, sharp dropoff down into the farmlands below.

It had been an idyllic settlement, where those who could afford to live there had been able to forget the steady decline of the economy, the skyrocketing price of gasoline and the escalating threat of nuclear war. In better times, it had afforded its residence an unparalleled vista of an endless checkerboard of farmlands, at times a flowing sea of golds and greens.

Two hundred years later, the town now had a grand view of miles upon miles of a dusty, wasteland with only the wide trenches carved out by shallow rivers and the skeletal remains of farmhouses as a grim reminder of what had once been.

Shepard, who was ignorant of what the land had once looked like, thought that it was pretty enough in its own way. Certainly the way the sun reflected off the occasional patch of exposed glassed earth was something to see. And the way the gentle winds would cause drifts of dust to flow across the ground like water was strangely hypnotic. Or the distant glitter off of ancient snaking waterways.

Of course, he was only able to see it as such due to the simple fact that he wasn't down there himself. It was like fire: very nice to look at, but you wouldn't want to get too close.

"Does anybody live here?" Tala'Xen asked at his side, looking down empty street of Fallston. "Is _that_ why you want_ed_ to come here?"

Shepard felt a chill run down his spine at the question. Though small parts of it were lost in translation, he understood the general gist of it.

He tore his gaze away from the lowlands in order to answer the question.

"No," he answered in their tongue, struggling with the sound of even so small a word. "Not for many time. Dead. Leave. Gone."

"Then why are we here?"

"Food," Shepard said succinctly.

Tala'Xen looked over the ruined town, frowning behind his faceplate.

"Really?" he asked, doubtful at the prospect. "Here?"

"Yes," the Human assured confidently. "Old food. Ancient. From before."

'Before' had become the codeword for 'before the world went to hell', because the mere concept of the kind of Armageddon they'd been living through wasn't one that could be properly conveyed in only a few weeks. Such a thing had to be lived through.

The aliens were getting there, though. They'd seen enough wasteland to gain a small notion of what the rest of the world was like.

"Huh," Tala grunted in comprehension. "But why do you need it? Don't you have enough back at the camp."

"Is food," Shepard said, as if that explained everything. "For you. Not me."

"Heh, _Kid_, if you find anything we can eat here, I_'ll_ be surprised."

Shepard was certain that "_kid"_ was some kind of nickname for him, and on that basis he found that he liked it. He'd have been less pleased with the moniker had he known what it meant, but he wasn't going to ask about it.

"I find," he said with absolute certainty. This was his last chance to find something for them. If he failed... well, he would have to leave, fleeing through the night once again hoping that he could outrun his own death. And even if he was better, he wasn't certain just how far or how fast he would be able to run. "Wait here. Watch. This place dangerous."

"Dangerous?" Tala repeated, sounding concerned.

"Others here, possible. They not..." Shepard explained. "Help. _Share._"

Tala'Xen thought bak to his own Pilgrimage days, when he too had spent long hours pouring through ancient ruins, abandoned asteroid belts or other places that people had long ago left behind, thinking the resources spent. Not everyone had been content to let him take what little he could.

"Yeah," the Quarian agreed, sounding bitter. "I get you."

He nodded to the nearest house, a modest home that had been painted cheery yellow in ages past. Centuries of wind, dust and sun had turned it an ugly, blotchy mix of brown and pale yellow where it hadn't been burned or simply blown away. The crumbling foundation was mercifully shrouded by long, wild weeds or creeper plants that had begun the process of climbing the woodwork.

Shepard took all this in, and then walked briskly over the home's overgrown lawn, careful to watch his step for anything lurking in the waist-high grass.

He then proceeded to plunder the house for whatever he could. Which, admittedly, wasn't much. There were a few bottles of nuka-cola to be found and a box of almost fossilized candies, but nothing else.

The next house, originally red with white trim but now a cracked and bleached pink, yielded only a box of Dandy Apples.

And in the next, half-collapsed but gamely trying to resist the inexorable pull of gravity and the wear of the elements, he found a single piece of desiccated, plastic-wrapped steak inside a rusting refrigerator.

And so it went, through house after house after house, hours upon hours until the sun was threatening to fall beneath the horizon and the first stars began appear in the sky. And only when he was absolutely certain that he had collected the last box of food, the last bottle of old-world liquor, the last piece of desperate hope that he had left did he present himself back to Tala and the rest of his soldiers.

He marched right on up to them with a hopeful grin and the fruits of his search held tightly in both his hands.

"Whoa there," Tala said, and gave a low whistle. "Think you have enough there?"

"Yes," Shepard answered and lifted his burden meaningfully. "Is food. You see any you like?"

"Sorry, _kid_," Tala said with a wry chuckle. "We don't eat that stuff. It_'s_ bad for us."

John Shepard, eleven years old and having had his last hope dashed, didn't know what to do. There was only one thing he knew the Quarians would eat, and it was him.

He let the boxed foodstuffs fall from his hands to the ground. He didn't want it: he would have to run soon enough and he didn't want to be burdened by their weight.

"Hey, don't be like that, _kid,_" Tala'Xen said reassuringly. "It's not the end of the world."

No?

But- they needed food! Nothing he'd found was suitable for them! He was the only thing left!

But... if they did, what else would they eat?

What else...

Hold on.

They didn't want to eat _him_.

They wanted to eat _humans_. And they wanted him to lead them to others.

John Shepard, eleven years old and recently having recovered from a gunshot wound and a still walking with a small limp, knew exactly where to lead them.

* * *

**AN:** So. Third chapter in, and I think the next one is the last. Maybe something of an epilogue as well, but a short one. So... yeah. Look forward to that!


	4. Chapter 4

**Binary**

Lien'Vael watched the odd little alien carefully as he hefted the large travel pack onto his back, marvelling quietly at his resilience. Only three weeks, and the child was already well on his way to making a full recovery.

So well, in fact, that he was getting ready to return to the place "where he ran away", a place beyond which Shepard had never actually spoken, both figuratively and literally. The child refused to speak of his life previous to being found by them, preferring instead to focus wholly on what lay ahead of him.

It had been a source of some discussion amongst the crew, actually. Everyone was curious as to why a child like Shepard had been fending for himself out in the middle of the wasteland. And because the child himself was loathe to impart such knowledge, everyone naturally imagined their own stories.

One of the more popular theory amongst the non-military personnel was that he was on his own version of a Pilgrimage, searching for something to bring back to his home that would make their lives easier. It was a familiar story, and served to paint the child as a kindred spirit of sorts. _Everyone_ could sympathize with something like that.

There was a reason why it wasn't believed by the marines, or rather those who had escorted the child out on his famous excursions: they knew that anyone who sent a child out into the wasteland alone, without any kind of protection, probably wasn't expecting that child to come back. They spoke of a grimmer story: his family had been attacked by one of the many monsters that Shepard had described to them. It was easy to imagine a _yao guai_ tearing out of the night and slaughtering everyone in sight, leaving Shepard to take the only wise course of action available to him: run.

But Lien'Vael and Sae'Sorel had their own theories, and kept it to themselves. And for good reason, as it was perhaps the most grim of all. The boy had been savaged by wild animals, to be sure, but the oldest wound had been the most revealing: a small hole in his side, and at its termination a small metal shard shredding away at his insides. It wasn't a very difficult picture to paint for the three officers. The boy had been shot. And whoever had done so had likely done the same or worse to his guardians.

The reason _why_ had always been a mystery, though. Seeing that mystery resolved was the primary reason the captain of the _Idenna_ had decided to come along on the excursion.

Because while Lien'Vael found the idea of shooting a child abhorrent, she acknowledged the possibility that there might have been a reason. A terrible reason of course, but she had listened in on enough of the boy's impromptu wilderness survival lesson to get a feel a brief idea of what kind of planet she had landed on: cruel and unforgiving. And it wasn't too much of a stretch to imagine that such an environment had had a hand in shaping those who lived in it.

Lien spared a glance over to the child's crow's nest of scavenged blankets, metal containers and old clothes and noted that all of the containers had been opened and their contents removed, obviously packed away in anticipation of the trip they would be taking.

And considering that the boy had built up a respectable larder of various dried meats, vegetables and water it seemed like he was expecting to be on the move for quite some time.

She inspected the pack on Shepard's back, and frowned in thought.

"How far do you plan on going?" she asked eventually, still looking at the overly large pack slung over his shoulder.

It was all well and good to travel on foot for short distances, but if Shepard had a longer journey in mind she would much rather use the shuttle to cross the distance.

The boy looked up at her, his brow furrowed as he worked out what she was saying.

"Far," he told her, speaking with that strange accent of his. Though it was likely few would admit to it, Lien had it on good authority that there was a minority among her number who were enthralled by the alien cadence and sound of his speech. "Days to... _East_. There," He pointed out into the wasteland pointedly. "Where you find me."

"What do you hope to find there?" a look

"Look. Find... others. More like me," he explained. "For you."

"For us?"

"Yes."

It didn't look like he wanted to elaborate.

Lien watched him for a moment, trying yet again to divine whatever it was he was getting at.

While she would certainly welcome the opportunity to meet with more his species and get a better idea of their general nature and temperament, she couldn't help but wonder what it was that Shepard wanted to out of it all. Well, no. The problem was in finding out which one of the multitude of reasons he wanted to go looking for others of his kind.

To find his family.

To tell others about them.

To get revenge on those who attacked him.

To get help for any possible survivors.

To... well, whatever else was percolating around in that alien mind of his. It was so very hard to tell what was going on between those funny little ears of his sometimes.

But it was better to be safe than sorry. She would have to nip certain ideas in the bud before they could blossom.

"Shepard, we can't help everyone on this planet," she told him as gently as she could. A blankness passed over the boy's features that she knew meant he hadn't fully understood her words, and she tried to put it into simpler terms. "We cannot help too many. You were a special case," the blankness persisted, and she tried to elaborate. "You were lucky."

That seemed to register on some level, because the boy nodded.

"I know," Shepard said, and closed his eyes. It was hard to tell, but he sounded almost resigned about it. "But... some? Maybe? Like me?"

She was reasonably certain that he was talking about... well, people who really weren't in a position to possess much hope about anything. And if she were at all honest with herself, she couldn't exactly deny him that.

"Maybe," she reluctantly acquiesced. "We cannot stay for long, though. More like us might be coming, and they'll either need our help or we'll have to move on."

"Oh," Shepard said, and looked down.

Lien felt like she'd just kicked a child's containment ball.

"But we'll do what we can while we're here," she tried to assure him.

"Yes," there was something about the way Shepard said the word that made it seem altogether far too menacing.

"In any case," Lien said, wondering just what was going on inside the child's mind that made him sound so unsettling. "If the place you want to go is far away, then we shouldn't waste time travelling by foot.

This got her anther blank look, which only caused her to sigh in exasperation. While the child's grasp of the language was impressive for the amount of time he'd had to learn it, it was still frustratingly limited.

"Follow me," he told him instead, and gestured for him to do the same as she turned to arrange things.

"Tala, tell the techs to get the shuttle ready!" she called out. "We've got places to be, and we haven't got the time to walk!"

* * *

The site where Shepard's fates had first taken a sharp turn for the worse was a few hours away from where the ground team had first landed and found the boy, which was no short distance when travelling by shuttle. It would have taken days to travel such a distance on foot, and again Lien found herself quietly impressed at the child's resilience to have done so in the state he had been when they found him.

There wasn't much left except a pair of rotting carcasses of the ugly _Brahmin_. What was left of their flesh almost seeming to pulse in disgusting parody of life as larvae and worms writhed beneath blotchy skin. At the boy's advisement, they set them alight just kill that which fed on them, to make sure that a beast that he'd only spoken of as a _Cazador_ would not emerge. They had yet to encounter one of the creatures, though by the way the boy spoke of them they should be glad for that.

There was also a single corpse of another alien, which Lien had spent a few moments dutifully securing samples and pictures of for Sae'Sorel to look over later. Right from the get go, however, it confirmed two things.

The first was that Shepard was, as they had long suspected, a child. The alien was much larger than Shepard, and would have stood at almost half again as tall as him in life.

The second was that the species had at least two genders, which Shepard had helpfully confirmed when he recognized the woman as his mother.

Needless to say, the latter discovery really put a damper on everyone's spirits. Especially the way Shepard seemed almost wholly unaffected by it, almost resigned. As if he had been expecting as much.

More troubling, however, was clear evidence that the woman had been shot. There was a small hole on one side of her neck where something had torn through flesh, and a messy, corresponding exit wound on the side where it had ripped its way out. There was no mistaking the wound for that of a wild animal, even if Shepard was uncharacteristically quiet on the subject.

Lien could have understood his silence, but the boy didn't seem to be visibly affected by the discovery of his dead mother at all. The strongest reaction she had noted was a small sigh before averting his eyes.

Instead of mourning the boy focussed on examining the scene around them.

The captain of the _Idenna_ had never really gotten a chance to watch Shepard in action before, but the marines had informed her that his skill with tracking was something to behold. And, watching him pore over the area and extrapolate from where his family had been attacked and from there where the attackers had gone after weeks of exposure to the elements she had to admit that his ability came just short of preternatural, if that. His rapid explanation for his assessment made little sense to her, though she had to admit that she was far from an expert on the subject. She was a captain: she belonged on a ship, telling other people what to do. She was somewhat out of her element with dirt under her feet.

Tala'Xen, for his part, seemed to agree with the child. Or at least he didn't argue, which was a good enough vouchsafe for Lien to begin the second leg of their excursion.

* * *

"Tell me," Lien said, her breath heavy with exertion. "How does anyone get around on this planet?"

The captain had been to a great many planets, quite a few of which hadn't seen an exploratory party before her crew had arrived, but _this_ one would forever linger in her thoughts as the most difficult. The wasted earth below her feet was like sand and mud at the same time

"You've seen it yourself, ma'am," Tala replied, his own breath a bit more ragged than usual. "With great difficulty."

"Quickly," Shepard urged them on from ahead, handily proving Tala wrong by being completely unaffected by the midday heat. "Already _noon_, cannot waste time. Night bad, need to make camp."

And then he loped off ahead, the limp of a only a handful of days ago almost completely unnoticeable.

The two Quarian officers paused for a moment in quiet admiration.

"So. "With great difficulty"?" Lien repeated. She didn't quite laugh, but anyone listening knew it was there.

"He's a kid," the marine grumbled half-heartedly in defence. "They never run out of energy."

"Quickly!" the child called out to them.

"As you say, lieutenant," the captain said.

"He's light, too. He doesn't sink as deep into the ground as us."

"Of course," she agreed. "Now let's hurry up before he leaves us behind."

The terrible quiet of the wasteland followed them as they trekked under the merciless midday sun, and with their own footfalls and the movement of the sky to keep time with minutes seemed to stretch into hours. Had they not been carefully listening for the subtle changes in the deceptive silence and watching the rolling horizon for movements, they might have been aware of _other_ signs that Shepard had never had reason to warn them about.

They paid no more attention to the pale, sun-bleached bones than they did to those blackened by nuclear fire. If they noted them at all: bones were something that the wasteland had in abundance, even two centuries of exposure to wind and nuclear winter could not have buried them all. And if there was torn or ruined clothes and armour near them? Well, sometimes people died. Sadly, the apocalypse was quite unnecessary for that to happen.

But Shepard _did_ pay attention to them. He noted the cleanly shorn arm bone, too sharp for it to have been broken by frenzied, monstrous hands. Still too intact to have been bitten off by hungry fangs.

He noted the three legs lying in a pile by a blackened log of wood.

A shallow pit had been filled with small bones, fingers it looked like, that could easily have been mistaken for rocks had someone not been looking for them.

There were a great many bones out there.

But very few skulls. Or spines and ribs, for that matter.

Shepard was beginning to get an idea of just who had ambushed his family and their caravan. And, though the thought made his stomach run hot and cold, he found that he was glad his mother had died in the ambush.

He cast a look to the long stretch of road to his left, and thought back to the last time

To the east there would be an enormous river, murky and swift flowing and, according to his mother, more treacherous than half-paid caravan guards. There wouldn't be many ways across on foot, and many of the Old-World bridges had been laid to waste long ago.

Hunting for travellers anywhere else would have been difficult. The vast spiderweb of roads between dead towns and toppled cities afforded caravaners like his family a multitude of possibilities to travel along.

But here, with a limited number of routes to travel? Where the very land itself conspired to channel all travellers onto a single road?

They wouldn't even need to move very far to find prey. All they needed was a good vantage point. He turned his gaze to his surroundings, and found what he was looking for on a low rise in the land to the north.

"There," the boy said, and pointed to small grey shape atop the hill. "There they are. We go there."

* * *

Mutiny was one of the most grievous of crimes among the Quarians, and carried with it some of the severest punishments that their people allowed for. It was right up there with treason, if barely.

But as the company of Quarians scaled the low rise, slipping and sinking the whole way, there wasn't a one of them that wasn't quietly considering doing just that as Shepard nimbly scampered up on all fours up a particularly steep rise with his comically overstuffed travelling bag still strapped to his back.

His hands found the dusty brown stoneline ridge, and with an agile shimmy put one foot atop it to use as leverage and slowly rolled over the top.

The Quarians watched in obvious envy as he then, without any noticeable signs of fatigue came to his knees.

"Here," he said, and waved his escorts forward.

Lien'Vael joined the boy on the ridge, and scanned the scene below. It took her a moment to really understand just what she looking at: it was just so overwhelming.

The structure would once have been an observatory of some kind if the enormous, cracked telescopic lens poking innocuously out of a slit in a tarnished grey-tiled domed roof was anything to go by. It was a squat little square, surrounded by crumbling walls and rusted wrecks pushed up to compensate for what the elements had laid low and a chain-link fence topped with a double helix of barbed wire. Whatever it had been in its past, it now served as a makeshift fortress.

And if it had _just_ been a fortress, there wouldn't have been anything at all amiss with the world. It wasn't a stretch of the imagination by any account to think that there were few things as comforting on a world such as this than four tall walls of stone and steel to safely watch the savage wasteland from.

But where it differed from a simple fortification was in its horrific adornments.

Lined in rows along the wall were what looked to be hundreds of skulls and decomposing heads of a multitude of species driven through wooden spikes. But chief among them were human. their empty sockets and dead, vacant eyes seemed to stare at them accusingly. Black birds perched atop several of them, too busy feeding on their grisly meal to spare any attention to the newcomers.

Chains were draped down from the walls, and they held flayed and headless bodies in place with hooks and barbs. The grey stone at their backs had been blackened by ancient by blood and gore, while the thirsty earth below had been turned into dark mud.

And the _bones_. It was like the contents of an ossuary had been upended before the walls and then left to slowly crumble.

"_Keelah,"_ Lien'Vael said with a quiet gasp. "What- How- Why would anyone do this?!"

"Warning," Shepard explained, and then shrugged. "Or fun. Not know. They..." he racked his mind for the word he was thinking of, but couldn't remember it. They'd never spoken of such things before now. "_Raider_," he said instead, spitting the word out like a curse. "They come, kill many, take others. Sell. Or eat."

"Eat?!" the captain repeated sharply, alarmed at the prospect. "Shepard, are you-"

The Quarian noticed the small scowl on the child's face, his narrowed eyes and the smouldering coals of anger that were burning there.

Whatever doubt she'd had that he was telling the truth vanished. He firmly believed that these people were either slavers or cannibals.

The woman scowled behind her faceplate, a cold fury building up inside her.

She would never again claim that life amongst the fleet was a hardship. Not when fate could have dealt them a much harsher fate. Not when they still held each and every one of their lives precious. Not when the thought of killing a child for the meat on their bones never crossed their minds.

"Why did you bring us here?" she demanded, suddenly furious.

"For you," Shepard told her, nodding dutifully at the building. "To eat."

"What?"

Shepard pointed at the ruined, desecrated structure.

"_Keelah,_" Tala'Xen muttered at her side. "That's it, captain. That's why he always offers first pick at his food."

"Explain, lieutenant," Lien demanded.

"He thinks we want him to find food for us," the marine told her quickly. "That's why he always wants to go looking for it.

"That why you save I," he told them, though now he didn't sound as certain. "You want food. Survive. Need help. Take from I."

Lien'Vael felt sick.

She found herself drawn back to her thoughts early that same morning: theirs was a hard world, and it in turn forced them to be hard. She'd had no idea how right she had been until that moment.

It had made them hard enough to survive alongside monsters.

Hard enough to survive long past the time they should have died.

Hard enough to steal the respect for life.

Hard enough to kill themselves.

Hard enough to make a child do the same.

This world was a nightmare, a hell made real from out of the nuclear fires started by their ancestors.

"No, John, that isn't why we saved you. We-" there came a loud wail from below, derailing her explanation. "what's going on?"

An alien, possibly female, had pushed open the chain-link gaits, panting for breath as she ran.

Something can flying after her from out of the observatory in a lazy arc, thrown after the alien no doubt. It was difficult to tell because of the distance they were from the whole thing, but Lien thought for a moment that it looked like a metal circle connected to some kind mechanism running through its diameter.

She watched in worried curiosity as the alien faltered in the sunlight, no doubt blinded by the sudden brightness, before the metal circle connected with her shoulder.

The device snapped shut at the middle with a high-pitched squeal of ancient metal, and for a split second Lien saw the sunlight reflect off jagged metal teeth before they were sunk into the alien's torso and arm.

"_Bear trap,"_ the boy said with a hushed tone and a shudder.

Another alien emerged from the fortress, dressed in torn leathers and heavy rubber

The sound was unmistakable.

It was laughter.

"_Keelah_," the oath came out as sickened whisper.

"Ah. No _slave_," Shepard affirmed with a grimace. The word he used was foreign to the Quarians, but it didn't take a genius to figure out that it wasn't good. "Food."

Lien looked to the boy sharply.

"Why?" she demanded angrily, letting a more than a little of her revulsion show. "How can you be certain?"

"No kill _slaves_," Shepard explained, and gave a small shrug. "No... _money_. Uhm. Worth. No one want dead."

Lien'Vael could only stare at the child as he calmly explained the cold logic of slavery versus cannibalism.

Another scream rang out, and despite her apprehension at what fresh atrocity was being committed Lien found her gaze drawn back to the grisly tableau below.

The _raider_ with the axe had severed the poor alien's arm at the shoulder, and was now waving it around above his head with wild hoots of laughter.

Something snapped inside the captain, and doubt about Shepard fled her mind. Nothing down there deserved the courtesy of such consideration.

"Tala, kill that monster," she ordered calmly.

"Aye, captain," the marine said, and without a moment's hesitation he obeyed. The loud rifle of his rifle tore through the deceptive silence of the wasteland, and a moment later the slaver's head snapped the side as the contents of its skull were splashed across the thirsty earth below.

The body wobbled, as if uncertain, and then it fell over forward onto maimed alien. The sudden weight must have severely agitated its already gruesome injuries, as another agonized shriek rang out.

"By the ancestors, put that poor creature out of its misery!" Lien ordered.

For some reason, Shepard looked up at her sharply with an unreadable expression.

Tala took sight through his rifle to do just that, but gave a quiet click of annoyance a moment later.

"Can't do that, captain," he reported regretfully. "No clear shot with that bastard on her."

"Then take a _bad_ shot, lieutenant," the woman snapped, a growing fury manifesting itself in her words.

The marine shot his superior a dubious look, but didn't disobey. It took three shots before the tortured wailing was abruptly silenced.

Nobody said a word during all that time. They continued to not say a word for several seconds after the maimed woman's screams stopped.

"Why didn't you tell us?" her voice was detached, but there was a tiny quaver in her words that betrayed her emotion.

Shepard gave a small shrug.

"No point," he said simply, as if that explained everything.

"_No point?_" Lien repeated angrily. "Your _parents_ where there, Shepard!"

"They not live," he explained, and shrugged again. "Small... family? Group? _Caravan._ Not many."

"_Why didn't you say anything?_" Lien demanded forcefully, angry at the calm way he spoke. At the quiet, almost sullen resignation. "We could have done something!"

Shepard looked at her as if she'd spoken nonsense.

"Why?" he asked. "They dead. Long before you find me. Or soon dead. I help you, I live."

"That wasn't- You don't-" the captain struggled to find the words to express just how _wrong_ he was. There was so much she wanted to say to him that she had trouble saying _any_ of it.

"You should have told us, _kid_," Tala said for her.

The boy seemed confused at their concern, which made it all the worse.

"Why?"

Lien'Vael pounded a fist against the ground in an attempt to vent her anger.

"Because this is _wrong!_" she all but shouted at him. "No one should live like this!"

"How should I live?" he asked.

The captain of the _Idenna_ didn't have an immediate response the question.

But they were also a species so desperate to survive that they would attack, kill and even _eat_ each other. Not even the Krogan had been reduced to such lows. They were like Vorcha, but with none of the fangs and claws. If Shepard could be counted as a representative of their kind, then she knew that they had the capacity to become every bit as civilized as her own kind.

The tragedy was that their plight didn't allow for that to happen. Worse, it fostered the more brutal aspects of their nature.

Who could say what Humanity would look like in a hundred years? What fresh breed of monster would stalk the dusty wasteland?

_Not these, at least,_ Lien'Vael thought to herself darkly. Her omni-tool blazed into life as she connected to her ship.

"_Idenna_, do you read me? Please respond."

"_Idenna here, captain,"_ the voice of Han'Mani confirmed briskly through her helmet's communication system. "_What seems to be the problem?"_

"I need you to get an orbital visual on my coordinates ASAP," she ordered, and scowled again. "And have low-scale mass accelerators primed."

"_Ah, yes captain," _Han said. There was a series of quiet beeps and clicks as he no doubt set her orders in motion. "_We should be in position about... now. We have a visual on your location."_

"Good," Lien said with a nod. "There is a structure not far to the North of my location. Can you see it?"

_"Yes captain, got it on the screen monitor now," _Han answered.

"Good," the Quarian said with great satisfaction. "Fire our secondary mass drivers on the structure. I want there to be nothing but ashes and pebbles left."

There was a moment's pause over the intercom before there was a response, caused no doubt by the surprise that she would issue such an order.

"_Captain? Are- are you certain? There could be locals living there."_

"I sincerely hope there is," Lien'Vael said fiercely. "Open fire, _Idenna_."

"_A, aye captain," _Han said with quiet consternation._ "Adjusting ship alignment now, projected time needed two minutes for firing solutions. Suggest you take cover."_

Shepard listened to the conversation, not understanding most of it.

Something fell from the sky, punching holes through the clouds as it screamed out its descent to Earth.

It wasn't an explosion of fire, but one of force. Which wasn't to say that there _wasn't_ fire, only that it wasn't the predominant factor. Stone walls collapsed and ancient cars were sent rocketing through the air by nothing more than the pure kinetic force of a few metal slugs fired from space. The sound of it was like a rush of air and a churning of earth but deafeningly loud. It arrived only a moment before a blast of wind and dust blasted past them, causing them to stagger backwards a step in order to keep their footing.

"How should you live? _With us_, Shepard," Lien'Vael shouted above the din as stone walls were reduced to rubble, crumbling into yet another ruin.

The Admiralty board could decide what to do with this people and the sorry state of its people when they arrived. But here and now?

She would do the only thing she _could_ do.

She would show him that the galaxy was more than just a wasteland.

"You live with us!"

* * *

Out of the ruins and rubble  
Out of the smoke  
Out of our night of struggle  
Can we see a ray of hope?  
One pale thin ray reaching for the sky

We can build a beautiful city  
Yes, we can; Yes, we can  
We can build a beautiful city  
Not a city of angels, but we can build a city of man

* * *

**AN:** I'd make an excuse for why this came so egregiously late, but any one that might have been valid was done with months ago. But they were good'uns, too. The flu was involved. And pneumonia! Hospitals! Godzilla! Well, maybe not him. I'm pretty sure that was a fever dream.

Anyways...

So, the story's done. Originally there going to be a different ending, but that idea was worn down when I realized that it would have been way too depressing to fit the general tone I wanted. So we get this instead. Enjoy them warm feels. _Enjoy them!_

(I know that Shepard and the Quarians would have needed to be pretty far away to avoid being ripped apart by the shockwaves from orbital bombardment, but it seemed wrong to waste time explaining them moving away. And I wanted to press on. So. Artistic license powers: ACTIVATE!)

Also, **the song at the end is a part of ****_"Beautiful City"_****, which I ****_think_**** is written by Stephen Schwartz**. It's in the Godspell movie. In any case, **I totally didn't write it**. I just thought it was appropriate.

And now it's time for us to have a talk. I know I did a bad thing last chapter: I didn't tell you to review, fav, follow and generally whore me out to other people. And I am so very sorry about that. Because you totally should do that. A world without me is a sad, lonely place. So, do me a favour and whore me out. C'mon. You know you want to. Whore me. C'mon. Do it._ Whore me._

_Whore! Me!_

_WHOOOOOOOOOORE!_

And now that things are nice and awkward, I flee back into the ether! 'Til next time, space cowboy!


End file.
